These remarks are of two kinds: first, what I have heard and witnessed, using the knowledge I have gained through all the years of my life; and second, what I intuit and cannot prove to you but nonetheless feel is important to share with you. I had a very hard time writing this essay. I would have liked to have my feelings transmitted to you in their purest form so that you might apprehend what I feel and know and intuit about the dilemmas our profession struggles with. These dilemmas are urgent to our field, now more than ever.

In the Nice meetings at the 10th conference of training analysts, the topic was reassessment of psychoanalytic education: questions about the oligarchic structure of those who train, changes within this framework, and the quality of the education were paramount, often controversial. Should the supervisor be more important than the training analyst? Should the curriculum be flexible? Have candidates developed a greater capacity for independent thought, or have candidates merely developed a shallow eclecticism? What are the goals of training? How do we select those who train?

You can see that the program was ambitious. Any one of these questions could have occupied us for days, for the people who engage in this conference are people of experience. They have done the work and weathered the various storms that have swept through all psychoanalytic societies and institutes.

I was in a German-speaking group led by Dr. Denzler from Switzerland and Dr. Szecsödy from Sweden. Although I did not do a head count, there might have been some 15 or 17 people attending.

I will summarize the daylong meeting by saying that the discussion centered around the advantages or disadvantages of a closed or open institute. In a closed institute the students have little or no say in choosing the analysts they train with, no say in the curriculum, and little say about anything in the institute; in an open institute the candidates have a large choice about any of these issues.

What soon cropped up in this discussion were complaints about certain cliques of older training analysts who usurp the power existing in their societies and pay no attention to the complaints brought to them. These analysts run a tight ship, it was explained again and again—if you do not like it you can either keep quiet or leave, even if you are as highly ranked as the training analysts. How remarkably like Los Angeles circa late 50s and early 60s!

The discussion then shifted to the lack of young people applying to the institutes, especially the lack of young M.D.s—a complaint echoed by all the members. Here I interjected that we have the same problem in the states. Though most of the group understood English, a Dr. Fink from Ulm translated my remarks into German, as their remarks in German were translated for me. At a certain point I said, looking at no one in particular, “Could it be that we have nothing to sell; that no one wants to buy our candy? Could it be, simply, that our paradigm is not working?”

No one said a word for a long moment. There was a feeling that ran around the room, coursing through the half-circle in which we sat—a feeling of astonishment, of disbelief, and even some annoyance.

Then the voices began to pipe up. There were protestations, and also, it seemed to me, some scrambling for rationalizations. An unwelcome thought had been brought to them, and no one cared to believe it or even touch it, so the topic quickly died away. Soon after there was further discussion about the sequence in the candidates’ education, a discussion that was safe, respectful, and of no real value. I do not want to go with this too much longer. Suffice it to say I have been attending these conferences for many years and always the same questions are asked, the same discussions are had. There is never a conclusion, which is why the same questions will be asked two years from now in Toronto.

What I want to ask of you now, though, is this: what does it matter what curriculum is taught or whether an institute is open or closed, etc., if the model we are following is not the correct one, if our paradigm does not work? Societies and institutes are impoverished in numbers, in belief, and in enthusiasm. Entrance into these societies is down; the young have no wish to come and their intuition, I feel, is correct. There is an air of decay, a propping up of old beliefs, and a hierarchical rigidity even in those societies that proclaim themselves as being open, liberal, and free. In France, as elsewhere, the centerpiece still seems to be the Oedipal complex—a situation that my work demonstrates to be an iatrogenic event—and yet it is clear that the Oedipal complex does not and cannot solve the problem in psychoanalysis. It is a philosophy that does not work.

Consider: If the Oedipal complex is the nucleus of all neuroses, the solution of the oedipal problem should lead to a peaceful happy life, with understanding and compassion for all human beings and contentment in both family and work. Experience shows that this is not true. If it were, the group most investigated and invigorated by the solution of this problem—that is, the analysts themselves—might be in better shape. Instead, they are riven into as many fractures as one might find in any other group of similar background and education, maybe even more so. The proliferation of splinter groups in the field of psychoanalysis, with their rivalries and hatreds along with their various emphases on certain aspects of human life, would seem proof enough that the Oedipal complex does not work.

Consider this as well: if there is a plan in the universe, an order that can be determined for man, beast, or flower—and I think most scientists see and believe this to be so—then I ask, do lions have an Oedipal problem? Or snakes? Or any manner of beast? It can be said we are special. To that I say we are special only in our capacity to have a mind that may be capable of awareness. Animals are operative through their instincts, and animals have one aim—survival, no other consideration. It must be likewise with humans who are enbued with the instincts of animals, and also with awareness, a quality given to us to help ensure our survival. This must be the bedrock of human life: the will to survive, from life’s first breath.

Focusing on the Oedipal complex means ignoring the infant’s earliest functioning. The Freudian model wipes away an entire layer of consciousness that opens the individual to his infantile mental and emotional life. The method is not available, generally, to deal with this infantile life at all, and the consequences of this oversight can be crippling: these early affects seep into adult functioning and create feelings of competitiveness and deadly rivalry.

Klein’s work might be thought to show the way to early mental functioning, except that her paradigm is Freudian, in that she retains the Oedipal complex and puts it at an early age. This in addition to her belief that envy is instinctual and that infants consequently hate the breast. The violence in this is considerable. How does one get out of a theory that condemns one to an affect of envy as an instinct? One cannot. This is a terrible burden to carry no matter how much analysis one has.

I have not here gone into all the issues and the reasons why the Oedipal complex does not solve the problem in psychoanalysis. In fact, as you have surmised, I do not think it is the central problem at all. In my experience I have reason to doubt there even being an Oedipal complex, with its sexual content and overtones. For when we look at survival as the predominant instinct in all life forms, our attention shifts. And it is my belief that for human beings, the imprint of the mother is the crucial factor.

It is clear to me we are to be in a mother-oriented psychology, as I understand it. Now I believe the research must shift from the Oedipal complex to the mother-child relationship, wherein all problems begin and from which all problems ensue. With the advent of a more feminine-centered era, I believe that our new discoveries will be about the infants coming into existence, about the mothers that bear them, and about the impact that the mother’s imprint has on the infantile mind, which carries him through life and becomes a vehicle for the projected unwanted unconscious thoughts and feelings of the mother.

We never feel this something that the mother imposes on us and indeed we are oblivious—or, more correctly, unconscious—of it for the most part of our lives. Freud talks about the repetition compulsion, which is a symptom of the imprint. I dare say all of us know about the repetition compulsion. Unfortunately, most imprints are filled with pain, with sadness, with grief, and with suffering. They oft times cause a continued unhappiness in life, an unhappiness that sometimes begins to show in the teen years but more often comes out in one’s adult life.

Because we have known sorrow at the beginning of life, because our minds have been shattered, and because we have shored up the ruins, sheltered them, and carefully stepped away, forgetting about these early events, we do not know why we develop certain ways of dealing with life or not dealing with life, with all the attendant consequences of that neglect—mostly bad, painful, and costly.

The paradigm of the mother’s imprint—that is, of the mother-child complex—contains a method that works, and answers many of the complexities that Freudian theory has not been able to solve, the prime one being resistance to change. Since an imprint is manmade, it can be erased if the person wants to erase it badly enough. But it is no easy climb to the top of the mountain. People feel that the imprint is part of their being; that to sever its tie will destroy them. Their dread is so great that they abstain, or fly away. Any fundamental change is viewed as a death to the immature and infantile mind that has remained so throughout the years of chronological growth and infantile development.

To confront such resistance and to fight this battle the analyst must bring little to the table except an open, ready mind. This is very hard to do. How an analyst looks at material is both a function of the analyst’s personality, plus his analysis, plus his particular beliefs. Since the analytic encounter is so frightening that the analyst may be and usually is armed with theory, it is no surprise that he usually finds the material to fit his theory.

It can be argued that patients attempt to please the analyst by bringing material, dreams, to do just that. However, a seasoned analyst can pick out such material and inform the patient that he is truly free to say and do whatever he truly pleases. Repeated experiences of this nature will give the analysand this conviction, so that the analyst can pursue the material with an open mind and follow it in the truth of the patient, not the theory of the analyst.

The problem in our field is that all students are imprinted by their analysts in the same way that they are imprinted by their mothers in infancy. Anyone who has worked in this modality soon sees how the power of the imprint is so awesome that, as an analyst, you have to admit bemusement at how fiercely a human being can defy common sense. This is proof beyond doubt that the patient’s salvation, his happiness, his fulfillment, his spirituality—for we are all looking for these things whether we acknowledge it or not—can come to the patient if he can let go of his imprint and discover who he truly is. And with this relinquishment will come all of the passion, the wild surmise of discovery no less than when Cortez contemplated the Pacific.

The candidate in the usual analysis never gives up his imprint for the model that is followed is one in which the Oedipal complex is the prime focus. Analysis conducted along these Oedipal lines never comes to this idea of imprinting. You cannot give something up that you have never had your attention called to—in your everyday life, in your family, or in your work. This is the greatest and most fundamental resistance to change, true change. I would say that at this time the analytic world knows nothing of this. It has never appeared at any meeting or in any journal or book. I hope and I trust that it will in the future.

I want to make one further point here as a consequence of the above: that when we as a group are asked by our leaders to deprive ourselves, to suffer, to sacrifice, there is almost a joy and a rush to that command. A contact has been made with one’s earliest infantile experience. The experience is forgotten—that is, the mind being shattered. Only the consequence remains: “This is what I have to do for mother to stay alive—I’ll sacrifice to the bone for that, for at all costs I must stay alive, whatever the price.”

Our leaders are our parents.

I say this not because I am unmindful of the dangers that lie ahead of all of us in all of our lives. I say this because suffering, pain, and sacrifice are not what I believe divine law wants of us. We have to get past human law, which we all have assumed was of divine origin. This assumption too must pass.

The intellect is the greatest enemy of the infantile emotional body. It would appear that the greater the intellect, the greater its fear against falling into infancy, though it is precisely this fall that would provide a real transformation of the personality and enhanced freedom and creativity. These all come from the baby self—fresh, innocent, receptive—an endearing breath of God, the truest source of all creativity.

It is my conviction through my many years of work using this paradigm, with its various attendant facts, that the psychoanalytic field can be revitalized through it. The knowledge that derives from this usage will answer in a direct way the many problems of psychoanalysis—the problems with no answer or poor answers, the problems that have been so off-putting not only to analysts but to the public, especially the very sophisticated, educated public that reads about analysis, writes about it, connects it to the affairs of everyday life, and reveals how seemingly nonsensical actions can make clear and far-reaching sense when understood in this way.

There will then be a concordance between the individual in his own life and in his connection to his life-relatedness, life choices, actions, disappointments, joys, depressions, and happiness. The affairs of state, all states, will be enlightened and all men will know each other in a closer way than ever before. The pursuit of this knowledge, of the unconscious through dreams, will also bring about a profound sense of the divine and the immanence of the divine in all of our lives—individual and mass consciousness in their intricate dance of life and death.

This idea contains the seed of all knowledge about the human being for the foreseeable future, at which time other problems will come into view and further discoveries will have to be made. And with the unfolding of this knowledge there will be the understanding of how this fact seeps out and influences all areas of knowledge, all parts of life—no job or profession will be a mystery, no man will be a mystery, free to wreak havoc on himself or on mankind. The potentiality is there to be unmasked. We just need the workers to begin this mighty task.

My words may sound like a bashing of all existing theories and methods. I myself have tried a number of the more prominent ones, and I have seen their effects on various patients who have come to me from these modalities.

I think this is a time when the universe itself is turning, and all things are turning—including ideas and, consequently, their practice. The universe has been taking this turn for several years, whether we like it or not, and it is a greater part of wisdom to go with the tide—the shift to a feminine-centered consciousness that is influencing all of life. The paradigm I offer is my interpretation of that shift in the practice of psychoanalysis. The future will bring more shifts, revealing even deeper forms of knowledge than any of us can dream of now.

This poem, by a writer who puts himself in the mind of God, reveals how we are to think of what has gone before, and of what will come after. Here is Paul Foster Case:

Apart from me, there is neither wisdom nor knowledge nor understanding.
Into every state of knowledge do I enter.
Into false knowledge as well as into true.
So that I am not less the ignorance of the deluded than the wisdom of the sage. For what thou callest ignorance and folly is my pure knowing, imperfectly expressed through an uncompleted image of my perfection.
Woe unto them who condemn these my works unfinished.
Behold, they who presume to judge are themselves incomplete.
Through many a fiery trial of sorrow must they pass.
E’er the clear beauty of my wisdom may shine from out their hearts like unto a light burning in a lamp of alabaster.